Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Why is the IPCC important?

There is an important group of volunteer scientists from across the world that identifies different factors dealing with weather and climate in the world. They draft objective reports to see how much our weather and climate are changing and how it is affecting us.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC was established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 and was created by the United Nations Environment Program. It aims to provide the most comprehensive scientific information about climate change to everyone in the world, especially government policymakers. A complete report is published every 6 to 8 years— the last one was published in 2014, periodic updates are published in between.

The IPCC has 195 member countries, and more than 800 scientists work on the big reports and its different core topics. Their drafts, analysis, and peer-review documentations and findings are key to climate negotiation around the world.

Each year there are thousands of scientific papers published in the world. The IPCC scientists assess these papers and provide a summary about the drivers of climate change, impacts and future risks, and how we can adapt or mitigate the risks. Although the scientists part of the IPCC does not conduct their own research, they do identify how strong a scientific agreement is in a certain area or if there is more research needed.

The next report part of the big IPCC´s Sixth Assessment Report cycle focusing on the impacts on nature and people of climate change by the working group 2 will be released February 28, 2022. This is an especially important report, and it will analyze all the impacts we are seeing ourselves as more extreme weather affects us all. There will likely be several key highlights as weather and climate-related disasters have increased five-fold from 1970 to 2019, and every year since the last full report in 2014 has been marked as warmest on record.